Daria is a Persona the user switches to: her name, her voice, his lines in the feminine

Context

The owner wants a choice of a man’s or a woman’s voice. On 2026-11-01 he chose Daria: switched on in Settings, she answers to „Hej Daria” and speaks as a woman. Darek stays the default on a fresh install, and the app, its icon and its listing keep the name Darek.

A Persona is more than a voice. The name is the first word of every Command, the word the name Decoys guard (ADR-0009), and the word whose presence decides between „nie rozumiem” and silence. Polish verbs agree with the speaker: nie załapałem is Darek, nie załapałam is Daria. They agree with the name in the UI too, and the name declines: „Darek nie zaczął słuchać”, „Daria nie zaczęła słuchać”.

Read on the host on 2026-11-01:

• Vosk’s vosk-model-small-pl-0.22 knows daria, darii, darię and dario, and the near-misses maria and marii (read from the symbol table in graph/Gr.fst, where darek, marek and powiedz were found and a nonsense word was not).
• Piper’s pl_PL-gosia-medium is 63 MB, 22.05 kHz, with the same inference settings as Darek’s mc_speech. Its phoneme map is mc_speech’s less five symbols our rules never produce, so ADR-0014’s pronunciation rules drive it as they are.

Decision

• A Persona is Darek or Daria, chosen in Settings, Darek by default. It sets the name, the voice and the grammatical gender. Personas are built into the app, never fuchy (ADR-0015).
• Only the chosen Persona’s name works. Every Command is the Persona’s name followed by its phrase, so a Command is written once, without the name, and works for both. The cancel words carry no name (ADR-0011): a bare stop or anuluj cancels whoever answers, and no hint quotes a name with them.
• The name Decoys are the same under either Persona, beside ADR-0009’s Command-word Decoys (otwórz, zamknij, brama): marek, jarek, janek, dawid, maria, marii, both names’ other forms darka, darku, darii, darię, dario, and the other Persona’s name, daria with Darek chosen and darek with Daria chosen. The vocatives darku and dario are Decoys like any other form: a Command starts with the name as it is written, and „Dario, otwórz bramę” gets silence, as „Darku, otwórz bramę” does today.
• The other Persona’s name gets a correction. A final result with no Command in it is answered in this order: the chosen Persona hailed („hej” right before the name, ADR-0009) gets „nie rozumiem”, or the not-configured line while no Command that calls is enabled; failing that, the other Persona hailed gets the correction in their place, whatever is enabled; failing both, silence. Daria says „Nie jestem Darkiem, mówisz z Darią.”, Darek says „Daria? Tu Darek, stary.”.
• Daria’s voice is pl_PL-gosia-medium as Piper publishes it, bundled in the app at full quality and fetched at build time from the same pinned Hugging Face commit as Darek’s, SHA-256 checked. Only the chosen Persona’s voice is loaded. At her config’s settings (noise 0.667, timing noise 0.8) she lisps; she speaks at 0.4 and 0.5, the best of the settings the owner compared by ear on 2026-11-01 (docs/phase-D.md).
• Switching the Persona while Listening restarts it. Stopping cancels a pending call, as any stop does (ADR-0011); the old voice is released, and the new start builds the grammar for the new name and loads the new voice. Lines rendered ahead are kept per Persona, so a line spelled the same in both genders is never played in the other voice.
• Her lines are his in the feminine. Every line a Persona speaks has both forms: the Replies, the not-understood and not-configured lines and the corrections, and the text shown when the voice fails is the chosen Persona’s form. A line with no gendered word, like „Otwieram bramę.” or „Anulowane.”, is written once. A fucha’s Reply may carry a feminine form; without one, Daria speaks the masculine one.
• The UI names the chosen Persona wherever it says who is listening, who hears or what to say: „Daria słucha”, the hints, the notification, with verbs agreeing with her. The app’s name, icon, listing and About screen stay Darek, and so do the lines about the app rather than who answers: the microphone disclosure, which is Play’s prominent disclosure for the app, and „Wymaga nowszej wersji Darka”.
• Debug-only extras follow the Persona too. The debug roast puts the chosen Persona’s name in front of its phrases and its lines follow the rule above, and the hears-you state (hearingName) looks for the chosen name, so no darek is left behind in either build.

Alternatives

Both names answer at once, each in its own voice. No switch, but twice the phrases that can fire a call, and Darek’s phrases would still place a call for a user who chose Daria.

Daria with her own character and lines. The owner may grow her some later. Writing every line twice, in the app and in every fucha, is the cost of starting there.

A Persona as a fucha. A Persona reaches every Command, every Decoy and every line’s gender; it is who answers, not one job among others.

Daria’s voice quantised to int8, or downloaded on demand through a Play asset pack. The owner heard int8 as clearly worse for Darek (ADR-0014) and finds a bigger download no problem. An asset pack adds a download state, an offline failure and a bundletool test path for one file.

Leaving the UI as Darek. It would tell a Daria user the wrong name to say.

One UI string with the name as a parameter. Polish declines the name and agrees the verb with it, so a %s cannot cover both Personas.

Consequences

• Daria is built after 0.4.0 and before phase 2, as its own step (docs/PLAN.md), so ahead of fuchy: the built-in Command catalogue drops the name from its phrases and carries each Reply’s feminine form beside it, and the fuchy format later takes the same shape.
• The download grows by another ~63 MB, and the installed size by about the same.
• gosia carries mc_speech’s licence grey area: CC0 recordings, fine-tuned from Piper’s English lessac voice, whose recordings are research-only (ADR-0014). The Licences screen credits it the same way.
• Every UI string that names the Persona is two resources, one per Persona, with the name written in, in both languages; the translation gate and TranslationTest hold each like any other string.
• Daria is read on the phone like Darek’s voice was (load time, synthesis time, the owner’s ear), and her name and Decoys are read against real voices before they are trusted to call.